Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[T]he pundit predictors were wrong.
Again.
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did not go at each other in Tuesday’s candidate debate in an effort to dominate the “progressive lane” of Democratic presidential candidates.
Instead, they supported one another, as though dueling back to back, their swords directed outward at the attacks from the barbarous moderates to their (physical) right and left. Neither had an unkind word to say about the other. At one point, Sanders even apologized to Warren. Apologizing is not his default position.
By the end of the seemingly interminable (actually not quite three hour) event, the two were still standing and unscarred, or at least visibly unscarred. Because they were so often challenged, the two of them talked more than the other eight candidates, and if they did not quite dominate the evening, they out-talked and out-performed the others.
For Sanders, this was good news. He got more attention than he did in the June debate and he rose to the challenge with his usual blunt attacks on the drug companies, health insurance companies, and others that he sees as malefactors of great wealth.
“Half of the American people are living paycheck to paycheck, and yet 49% of all new income goes to the top 1%,” he said in his opening statement.
Nothing new there. It’s what he’s been saying for years, but Tuesday night he said it before a big audience and he said it well.
The only problem, from a Bernie-centric perspective, as that while he was good, Warren was better. She was as vigorous as he in assailing what she called a “corrupt, rigged system that has helped the wealthy and the well-connected and kicked dirt in the faces of everyone else.”
And while she also ended up repeating herself now and then, she did it with somewhat fresher language, using fewer clichés, and in a more upbeat manner. They both support “Medicare for All.” Sanders scowls as he does so. Warren smiles. As always, Sanders called for “a political revolution,” and came across as someone who wants to lead a revolution. Warren did a better job of coming across as someone who wants to lead the country.
For the nonce, then – and in politics, these nonces can be fleeting – Warren is likely to be recognized as the leader of that “progressive lane.”
If there really is a progressive lane. The concept, after all, is the invention of the same chatterers who predicted that Sanders and Warren would squabble.
There is a real difference within the Democratic field over how to provide health care for everyone. But all of them want to provide health care for everyone. Not long ago, that would have been considered very “progressive.” Now, according to the chatterers, a Democrat wary about abolishing the health insurance system that now serves – and for the most part pleases – more than half the voters therefore becomes a moderate, or at least not a progressive.
Not an incorrect approach to the Democratic contest. But insufficiently nuanced.
But nuance seems out of fashion and was certainly not the goal of the CNN staffers moderating the debate, whose questions were designed to create controversy or to try to trip up candidates over things they have said in the past. Both Sanders and Warren accused the questioners of using “Republican talking points.”
So it seemed. In fact, among the happier viewers of Tuesday’s debate may have been Republican strategists.
Besides, while Warren and Sanders stood their ground and gave better than they took, those “moderate” attackers landed some blows that could haunt whoever ends up dominating the “progressive lane.”
Eliminating private health insurance, as both Sanders and Warren propose, “will tell the union members that gave away wages in order to get good health care that they will lose their health care because Washington is going to come in and tell them they have a better plan,” said Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan.
And neither Sanders nor Warren really explained how their health care plans would be financed, and by whom.
While most of the attention was on Sanders and Warren, some of those moderates on the stage didn’t perform all that badly, either. None had the kind of “break-out moment” that might set them apart from the others, or guarantee them a place in the next round of televised debates in September.
But a few of them may have done well enough to survive, at last for a while. Former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke was sharper and more forceful than he had been in June. So was Marianne Williamson (perhaps aided by the “occult task force” mobilized on her behalf according to the Washington Post).
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, who was not eligible for the June debates, made an impressive if not spectacular debut.
“I’m a pro-choice, pro-union, populist Democrat who won three elections in a red state,” he said. “Not by compromising our values, but by getting stuff done.”
Whether the “getting stuff done” approach will be enough to put Bullock in the running to be a contender in what is being called the “moderate lane” remains to be seen.
The leader of that lane, and according to the polls the leader among all the contenders, was not on the stage Tuesday. Former Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to be at stage center Wednesday night, right next to California Sen. Kamala Harris, who baited and bettered him in the June debate.
The pundits are predicting they will clash again, and – who knows? – this time the pundits could be right.
